138 LESSONS FKOM NATURE. [CHAP. VI. 



like their worshippers, before the white man and his mightier Deity. 

 And thus, even where no positive proof of religious development among 

 any particular tribe has reached us, we should distrust its denial by 

 observers whose acquaintance with the tribe in question has not been 

 intimate as well as kindly. Assertions of this sort are made very care 

 lessly. Thus, it is said of the Andaman Islanders that they have not 

 the rudest elements of a religious faith ; Dr. Monat states this ex 

 plicitly ; yet it appears that the natives did not even display to the 

 foreigners the rude music which they actually possessed, so that they 

 could scarcely have been expected to be communicative as to their 

 theology, if they had any. In our time, the most striking negation of 

 the religion of savage tribes is that published by Sir Samuel Baker, in 

 a paper read in 1866 before the Ethnological Society of London, as 

 follows : The most northern tribes of the White Nile are the Dinkas, 

 Shillooks, Nuehr, Kytch, Bohr, Aliab, and Shir. A general description 

 will suffice for the whole, excepting the Kytch. Without any excep 

 tion, they are without a belief in a supreme being, neither have they 

 any form of worship or idolatry ; nor is the darkness of their minds 

 enlightened by even a ray of superstition. Had this distinguished 

 explorer spoken only of the Latukas, or of other tribes hardly known 

 to ethnographers except through his own intercourse with them, his 

 denial of any religious consciousness to them would have been at least 

 entitled to stand as the best procurable account, until more intimate 

 communication shoiild prove or disprove it. But in speaking thus of 

 comparatively well-known tribes, such as the Dinkas, Shillooks, and 

 Nuehr, Sir S. Baker ignores the existence of published evidence, such 

 as describes the sacrifices of the Dinkas, their belief in good and evil 

 spirits (adjok and djyok), their good deity and heaven-dwelling creator, 

 Dendid, as likewise Near, the deity of the Nuehr, and the Shillooks 

 creator, who is described as visiting, like other spirits, a sacred wood 

 or tree, Kaufmann, Boun, Bollet, Lejean, and other observers, had thus 

 placed on record details of the religion of these White Nile tribes, years 

 before Sir Samuel Baker s rash denial that they had any religion at 

 all.&quot; Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 381. 



Again, Mr. Tylor quotes, as surprisingly inconsistent,-- 



&quot; Mr. Moflfat s declaration as to the Bcchuanas, that man s immor 

 tality was never heard of among that people, he having remarked in 

 the sentence next before, that the word for the shades or manes of the 

 dead is liriti. In South America, again, Don Felix de A zara com 

 ments on the positive falsity of the ecclesiastics assertion that the 

 native tribes have a religion. He simply declares that they have none ; 

 nevertheless, in the course of his work he mentions such facts as that 

 the Payaguas bury arms and clothing with their dead, and have some 

 notions of a future life, and that the Guanas believe in a being who 



